Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

Late in the evening of March 1 1994, Kurt Cobain staggered towards a microphone and screamed out what remained of his lungs. While singing Heart Shaped Box was often cathartic, that night’s performance, to a 3,000-strong audience squeezed into a converted airport hanger in Munich, was even more ragged than his band mates in Nirvana had come to expect. It was the howl of someone staring into, perhaps already hurtling towards, the abyss.

Cobain was suffering acute bronchitis, heightened by the effects of heroin withdrawal. You could hear it in his singing – the turmoil, the paranoia and desperate desire to be anywhere else in the world than on stage, fronting one of the world’s biggest bands....